The Ideal Team Player Is Missing A Fourth Trait
By Mark Cohen
Patrick Lencioni's The Ideal Team Player argues that the best people on a team share three traits: humble, hungry and smart. I've used that model in hiring conversations for years and it still holds up, but I don't think it's complete anymore. than any of the other three. I recently posted a short video on this thought - the fourth trait I look for now is curious, and I think (at least in the world of product and tech) it's becoming more important than any of the other three.
I worked with a product team a few years ago that had everything the first three traits promise. They were humble about what they didn't know, they worked hard, and they were sharp. What they hadn't done was keep their technical skills current. The platform had been built on an older stack, and several attempts to rebuild it had stalled because the team would reach for the tools they already knew instead of mastering the tools the rebuild actually needed. Ultimately the fix required bringing in people with modern architecture experience, and the trajectory of that project changed fairly rapidly. The original team wasn't lacking effort or intelligence. They were lacking the habit of staying curious about how the craft itself was changing.
I've seen versions of the same pattern with AI adoption over the last year. Some teams treated it as a tool worth exploring immediately, even before they had a clear use case, purely because they wanted to understand what it could do. Other teams waited for a directive. I can't argue for a direct causal line from curiosity to outcome, because so many other variables are in play, but undeniably the teams that explored early are moving faster today than the teams that waited to be told to explore.
The reason curiosity matters more now than it did ten years ago is the pace of change itself. with constant effort, leaders can push one or two people to keep learning and stay on top of a shifting landscape. What a leader cannot do is personally push twenty people to do the same thing, in twenty different specialties, indefinitely. Pushing knowledge doesn't scale. Curious people pull knowledge and scale it for you, because they go looking for what's changed without being asked.
What's something interesting you've seen done with technology recently, or what's your favorite app, even if it has nothing to do with work, and why.
I'm currently interviewing candidates, so this next part is a free kick for any candidate who researches me before an interview:
I've changed how I interview because of this. Toward the end of an interview, I move away from the job-specific questions and ask something unrelated, some version of this:
What's something interesting you've seen done with technology recently, or what's your favorite app, even if it has nothing to do with work, and why?
What piece of technology or app do you think has made you life better, and why?
What's the coolest use of AI (or tech) you've recently seen? Tell me about it?
The content of the answer matters, sure, but importantly what happens in the (virtual) room when I ask matters too. Some candidates light up immediately, with a story ready to go. Others visibly search for an answer they think is acceptable, wondering what the "right" answer is. That difference tells me more about how someone will handle the long haul parts of a product role than many things on their CV's.
The part that's on us
Hiring curious people is only half of it, though. If the organization doesn't give that curiosity somewhere to go, it either leaves or goes quiet. That means space to experiment, a hackathon that isn't just for show, and permission to try something that might not work. Without that, you've hired ten curious people and built an environment that trains them out of it within a year.
Skills age and expire at an increasingly rapid pace. Curiosity is the trait that keeps replacing them before you notice they're gone.